Yom Kippur, Toronto. Shots fired. Again.

“Thomas, have you seen the demographics of my riding?”

A Jewish school in Toronto was hit by gunfire Saturday for the second time this year, local police say, amid a rise in antisemitic attacks in Canada in the wake of the war in the Middle East. . . The school in the North York area of Toronto was targeted in a similar incident in May, and police believe the two shootings are connected.

Yes, it’s fair to guess that the incidents are “connected.” Also connected, I’d guess: These incidents occurred in Toronto, birthplace of “Israel Apartheid Week,” in 2005, an annual creepiness that went on to be replicated in more than 60 countries around the world.

Another Toronto first: the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which also kicked off in 2005. Also connected: The Arab League boycott launched in December, 1945, aiming for the “total strangulation of Jewish industry.” Old bottles, new wine.

Other connections: From last October 7 to this past July, roughly half of the 1,556 calls to the Toronto Police Service reporting hate crimes were incidents targeting Jews, mostly unprovoked assault, the uttering of threats and mischief to property.

Rabbi Nochum Sosover and Rabbi Yaacov Vidal at the Toronto Jewish girls school Bais Chaya Mushka, after the shooting.

In the ‘hate crimes involving religion’ category, the TPS reports that 80 percent of such crimes since October 7 last year, the day of the Simchat Torah pogrom, involved an “anti-Jewish occurrence.”

Of Toronto’s three million people, only about 120,000 are Jews.

I don’t mean to pick on Toronto. Montreal appears to be worse, but the statistics are much the same in any of Canada’s major cities.

Stick with me. I get a bit cheerier down below.

Intermission

I’ve been crazy busy these past couple of weeks and things are going to be a bit spotty around here this coming week. I’m off to Montreal for some summiteering, and then to Ottawa. This gathering is the big deal:

I’ve been keeping my powder dry on the Chinese influence and collusion file lately but over at the Globe, Steve Chase, Bob Fife have been holding up their end magnificently, as has Sam Cooper at The Bureau. It’s a file I’ll be returning to in this newsletter and in the National Post shortly, along with with (I hope) some astonishing findings about the comings and goings of the allegedly terrorist-listed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Canada.

End of intermission.

How has it come to this?

Well, that’s the big question, isn’t it. I don’t like to be like this, but I’m afraid Canada’s journalists do carry a bit of the blame by spending the first decade of this century trafficking in the fiction that the anti-Zionist mutation of antisemitism was either a thing to be ignored, or conveniently misrepresented as an “anti-war” movement.

When you’re done here, see The Real Story, In Front of One’s Nose: A shadowy alliance of Islamist antisemites and Canadian "progressives" goes back two decades to a founding gathering in Cairo. . . For even deeper background, see How Could This Be Happening? from last October 14.

It would be too easy to point to Muslim or Arab immigration for the Canada’s current dyspepsia. The predicament facing Canada’s Jews, which all of us must face if we’ve any decency about us, isn’t solely because Canada’s Muslim population has doubled over the past 20 years to roughly 1.8 million people.

It’s just not enough to explain the Trudeau government’s paralysis in the tsunami of antisemitism roaring across the country or the Liberals’ lazy hostility to Israel and their embarrassing incoherence in the matter of the war Hamas, Hezbollah, Khomeinist Iran and the Yemeni Houthis’ Ansarallah regime is waging against Israel.

But it does go at least some way to explain Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly’s maundering passive-aggressiveness and unintelligibility in the matter, although I suspect she does come by those charateristics honestly, so to speak. Joly herself has offered the “Arab vote” explanation in a recent conversation with former New Democratic Party leader Thomas Mulcair.

In his own account of an exchange with her about her government’s “utterly incomprehensible” and “indecipherable” postures relating to the Israel and the war, Joly said: “Thomas, have you seen the demographics of my riding?”

I’ve seen them. You can have a look yourself.

Bearing in mind that the Liberals’ wide-open “immigration policy” might have skewed things even further over the past three years, by 2021 Statistics Canada found that of the 118,000 residents of Ahuntsic-Cartierville, 44,195 were immigrants.People who identify as visible minorities in Joly’s riding numbered 48,120 people; 21,620 were Muslims, among whom 16,305 were Arabs, 11,089 of whom were of voting age. Statistics Canada counted a whopping 225 Jews in the riding in 2021.

So, if you’re running a whole-of-government policy based on the nurturing of grievances against Canada and the triangulation of racial and ethnic identity oblasts, I guess Joly’s behaviour and her weird utterances would make sense. “Pandering” would be downright savvy.

‘We are all Hezbollah now’? When did that happen?

To the question of the degeneracies that have been on parade across Canada since last October, a sturdier investigation would notice something more important. By the time of the Hamas atrocities in Israel last year, a bistro “anti-Zionist” mutation of antisemitism had already found a comfortable home for itself in Liberal-NDP circles.

Much is being made of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s claim this past week that the toxic wave of antisemitism sweeping across Canada is due to the Liberals “pandering” to Hamas supporters. This isn’t anywhere near as far-fetched as Mulcair would want you to believe. While I took some issue with Poilievre’s commentary here, and will find him wrong in important ways below, he is not wrong about the basics, as Joly’s remarks to Mulcair make plain.

In his address to the Jewish community in Ottawa on the Day of Remembrance, Poilievre said: “This is not the first war that Israel has had to fight. . . . those wars did not spill into Canadian streets. It’s true. It’s true. In 2008, and 2007 and 2006, when Israel was forced to fight back against Hezbollah in Lebanon, there was no violence in our streets.”

That’s not quite true. But hold on.

“Why all of a sudden has such hatred found a home in Canada?” Poilevre asked. His answer: “This ideology that seeks to divide our people based on race and ethnicity that has led to these horrifying outbursts of hatred are not from the bottom up, they are from the top down.”

That’s true enough, except for the “all of a sudden” part. The Trudeau government’s “postnational” insistence on national masochism by immersion in the polemics of white supremacy, Islamophobia and decolonization certainly provide the cultural petri dish and the federal subsidy incentives for “anti-Zionism” and antisemitism to flourish.

It is “all of a sudden” that Canadians have responded with revulsion to what they have been witnessing in the streets and on campus since last October 7, that’s true. That’s a good thing: We see you, and we’re disgusted by what we see. Certainly by last October the degeneracy of the activist milieu had become all too obvious, too brazen to ignore. But it’s not like it came out of nowhere.

Where did it come from?

It isn’t true that there was no violence in our streets or that there was no open support of terrorist groups during Israel’s entanglements in Lebanon from 2006 to 2008. During the Second Lebanon War there were innumerable “We Are All Hezbollah Now” rallies across the country.

“Anti-Zionism” was in already in full flower by then. In Montreal, young Lebanese who showed up with a “Peace for Lebanon and Israel” banner were pushed around by marchers waving Hezbollah flags and posters with Hassan Nasrallah’s face on them. The same spectacles occurred routinely in Toronto and Vancouver.

When you see all those Hezbollah flags and Nasrallah’s face at all those weekend rallies these days, just remember that.

So, why now? Well, shouting “We are Hamas, we are Hezbollah,” burning the Canadian flag, praising Hamas rapists and slaughterers as revolutionary heroes and demanding that Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine be struck from Canada’s terrorist list will definitely attract attention.

But that’s not new, either. And it’s not just the insufferable Charlotte Kates of the Samidoun Network who has been banging on like this.

More than 20 years ago, the Canada Palestine Association, the International Solidarity Movement - Vancouver, Harsha “Burn it all down” Walia’s No One Is Illegal organization, the Palestine Community Centre, the Palestine Solidarity Group and the Vancouver Stop The War Coalition had adopted exactly the same position.

All of these groups explicitly protested Canada’s listing of the PFLP, the Palestinian Liberation Front, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah as proscribed terrorist entities. To call these bloodthirsty killers “terrorists” was “ill advised, biased and outrageous,” all these organizations declared.

This was not just some fringe weirdness. Vancouver’s Stop The War Coalition represented the B.C. New Democratic Party, the B.C. Teachers' Federation, the Hospital Employees Union, the Vancouver Green party and the United Church of Canada. Either they all knew what was being said in their name, or they didn’t want to know and just looked away.

For all that, see The Real Story edition A reckoning is long past due.

How many tens of thousands of protesters turned out for demonstrations the mainline news organizations in this country dutifully described as “anti-war” protests organized by the Canadian Peace Alliance and the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War?

Here’s the Alliance’s James Clark at a meeting of Islamists and neo-Marxist groupuscules in Cairo, in 2007: Islamophobia could be weaponized to "educate and mobilize people” because Islamophobia was being deliberately enflamed in Canada in order to wage war in Muslim countries. Clark vowed that Canadian activists, “inspired by the Arab resistance in Lebanon and Iraq,” could be depended upon to "work with Muslims to defeat imperialism."

It’s Thanksgiving Weekend. Let’s give a bit of thanks, shall we?

I’ll be off for a lovely Thanksgiving dinner with family shortly so I’ll end on an upbeat note, as promised.

Hassan Nasrallah is dead. Hamas is all but destroyed. The war grinds on, and it’s absolutely, utterly awful, as wars of this kind will be. If you have prayers to offer up, do pray for the living and the dead. But Israel is still winning.

The tumbrels turn slowly, but they turn:

It was more than two years ago that I completed an investigation for the National Post on how it came to pass that an affiliate of the terrorist-listed PFLP had established itself in Canada with the blessing of the federal Corporations Canada agency. See also Samidoun: The Network, a deep-backstory piece in this newsletter.

I’ve been covering Samidoun’s comings and goings ever since. Samidoun has been behind most of the ugliest disturbances (I really do wish my colleagues in the news media would stop using the term “pro-Palestinian” to describe these events) across Canada over the past year.

Worth being thankful for: Over the past few days, the spotlight on Samidoun has never been quite so bright. My piece in the National Post this past week: Liberal failure to outlaw pro-terrorist group Samidoun is mind boggling. See also this from Real Story on Thursday.

Conservative foreign-affairs critic Michael Chong and MPs Jamil Jivani and Shuv Majumdar have each raised the issue in Parliament. Poilievre has vowed that a Conservative government will ban Samidoun. Weird that it’s happening only now, but still: Public Safety Minister Dominic Leblanc says he’s requested an “expedited” review of the Samidoun issue. “We hope to come back to Canadians with information very soon,” he says.

And now there’s this: The families of the several Canadian victims of the October 7 massacres have filed a lawsuit under Canada's Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act and several other statutes claiming damages of more than $250 million. The plaintiffs are jointly represented by lawyers from Borden Ladner Gervais LLP, Gardiner Roberts LLP, and the Human Rights Action Group.

The named respondents: Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Fatah - the party of Palestinian National Authority president Mahmoud Abbas - the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Khomeinist regime in Tehran, Bashar Assad’s torture state in Damascus . . . and Samidoun.

From their statement of claim in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice: “The Samidoun Defendants have committed offences including, but not limited to, providing or collecting property for terrorist activity, providing or collecting property for the benefit of persons facilitating or carrying out terrorist activity, participating in the activity of a terrorist group, leaving Canada to participate in the activity of a terrorist group, and facilitating terrorist activity.”

I wish the plaintiffs all the best. I also wish them comfort in their sorrow in the loss of their loved ones.